Grey Area

For generations, the Civil War narrative about Canada (which was not quite a country at the time) and the United States (which had split into two) remained pretty consistent. It was both simple and satisfying: Canada, bright beacon of freedom for enslaved Black people, had been a welcoming land of refuge, the last stop on the Underground Railroad that carried some 30,000 to safety and emancipation.

Countless children’s books have been written on this theme, with about two dozen currently in print, including The Underground Railroad: Next Stop Toronto!, by Adrienne Shadd, Afua Cooper, and Karolyn Smardz Frost. Museums sprang up about it in, among other places, Emeryville, Ontario; Niagara Falls and Ausable Chasm, New York; Cincinnati, Ohio; even Nebraska City, Nebraska. Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad, an imaginative and impactful novel from 2016, won a...